B. P. Rinehart

“But passport stamps and wide vocabularies are neither wisdom nor morality. As it happens, you can see the world and still never see the people in it. Empires are founded by travelers, and the claim of some exclusive knowledge of the native is their mark. I always imagined reparations as a rejection of plunder at large. And who in modern memory had been plundered more than the victims of the Holocaust? But my prototype was not reparations from a genocidal empire to its Jewish victims, but from that empire to a Jewish state. And what my young eyes now saw of that state was a world where separate and unequal was alive and well, where rule by the ballot for some and the bullet for others was policy. I was seeking a world beyond plunder—but my proof of concept was just more plunder.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Message

“An inhumane system demands inhumans, and so it produces them in stories, editorials, newscasts, movies, and television.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Message

“The Trump years amazed a certain kind of white person; they had no reference for national vulgarity, for such broad corruption and venality, until it was too late. The least reflective of them say, “This is not America.” But some of them suspect that it is America, and there is great pain in understanding that, without your consent, you are complicit in a great crime, in learning that the whole game was rigged in your favor, that there are nations within your nation who have spent all of their collective lives in the Trump years. The pain is in the discovery of your own illegitimacy—that whiteness is power and nothing else. I could hear that same pain in Avner’s and Guy’s words. They were raised under the story that the Jewish people were the ultimate victims of history. But they had been confronted with an incredible truth—that there was no ultimate victim, that victims and victimizers were ever flowing.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Message

“...When you are erased from the argument and purged from the narrative, you do not exist. Thus the complex of curators is doing more than setting pub dates and greenlighting--they are establishing and monitoring a criterion for humanity. Without this criterion there can be no oppressive power, because the first duty of racism, sexism, homophobia, and so forth is the framing of who is human and who is not.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Message